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Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

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Abstract

The first report of hydrocephalus with normal pressure is dated back to 1956, when Foltz and Ward published a case report of a patient with normal pressure communicating hydrocephalus after subarachnoid haemorrhage. However, there were no further investigations of the causes and consequences in this case. The first scholar and clinician who studied this specific type of hydrocephalus was Salomón Hakim a few years later. He and his counterpart Raymond Adams worked on a detailed description of the disease’s manifestation, subsequently setting the cornerstones of the diagnosis and treatment options for patients suffering from, as currently officially recognised, normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). Since then, there has been a growing body of literature reports paying more attention to the disease—to its pathogenesis, pathophysiology, challenging diagnosis, and the demand for improving treatment efficacy. NPH was in the second half of the 20th century described as a new form of reversible dementia, a disorder that had long been considered terminal and irreversible. The famous story of Hakim’s “discovery” of NPH initiated a new era dedicated to improving the diagnosis of the disease, more efficient treatment targeting in relation to significant technical improvement in cerebrospinal fluid drainage procedures, and therefore improving the overall prognosis of NPH patients. This chapter describes the historical findings of hydrocephalus over centuries that led to the uncovering of NPH, the discovery of NPH itself, together with fundamental breakthroughs in the past decades that have enabled us to study NPH more in detail, as further introduced in individual chapters throughout this book.

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Abbreviations

CSF:

Cerebrospinal fluid

DESH:

Disproportionately enlarged subarachnoid space hydrocephalus

ELD:

External lumbar drain

ICP:

Intracranial pressure

iNPH:

Idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus

LIT:

Lumbar infusion test

NPH:

Normal pressure hydrocephalus

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Funding

This chapter was supported by the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic institutional grant no. NU23-04-00551.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, 2nd Medical Faculty, Charles University and Motol University Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Skalický, Adéla Bubeníková, Aleš Vlasák & Ondřej Bradáč

  2. Department of Neurosurgery and Neurooncology, 1st Medical Faculty, Charles University and Military University Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic

    Adéla Bubeníková & Ondřej Bradáč

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  1. Petr Skalický
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Correspondence to Ondřej Bradáč .

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  1. Department of Neurosurgery, 2nd Medical School, Motol University Hospital, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Ondrej Bradac

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Skalický, P., Bubeníková, A., Vlasák, A., Bradáč, O. (2023). History. In: Bradac, O. (eds) Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36522-5_2

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